Zoom through the scale of the universe
Start with a coin and keep zooming: a person, a blue whale, the Burj Khalifa, Everest, the Moon, Earth, the Sun and giant stars, all drawn to scale. 172 things, every size from a named source.
Zoom through the scale of the universe: the tool
Scroll or swipe on the board to zoom, or drag the slider. Every size is the sourced figure from our library.
How it works
The board always shows the things closest in size to the zoom level, drawn to the same scale and standing on the same floor. Each step of the slider is a factor of ten in size, so a few steps take you from a coin to a city and on to a star.
Steps on the way
One thing for each power of ten, picked from the board's library, so you can see how fast the sizes grow:
- US dime (10 cents): 1.8 cm (0.71 in) across
- Credit card (ISO/IEC 7810 ID-1): 8.6 cm (3.37 in) wide
- Grizzly bear: 107 cm (3 ft 6 in) at the shoulder
- Orca (killer whale): 9.8 m (32 ft) long
- Big Ben (Elizabeth Tower): 96.3 m (316 ft) tall
- Burj Khalifa: 828.0 m (2,717 ft) tall
- Mount Everest: 8,848.9 m (29,032 ft) tall
- Ceres: 952 km (592 mi) across
- Venus: 12,104 km (7,521 mi) across
- Saturn: 120,536 km (74,898 mi) across
- Sun: 1,391,400 km (864,576 mi) across
- Betelgeuse: 1,063,030,000 km (660,536,218 mi) across
The figures come from the same sourced library as the rest of the size comparison pages: NOAA and museums for animals, makers for vehicles, official and survey figures for buildings and mountains, NASA for planets, and astronomy papers for stars and black holes. See the size comparison to line things up yourself.
Questions
What is the biggest thing here?
The M87 black hole: the European Southern Observatory describes it as just under 40 billion km across.
What is the smallest?
A US dime, 17.91 mm across (Wikipedia).
Last checked: 5 October 2026